


until i see the light

by badacts



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Depression, M/M, Medication, Mental Health Issues, Mixed Affective State
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 00:57:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9943097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badacts/pseuds/badacts
Summary: Bee uses the word relapse with him, explains that he’s veering off baseline like he can’t figure that out for himself. All Andrew cares about is that he hasn’t been looking for reasons to stay alive like this for so, so long.





	1. relapse

**Author's Note:**

> You may recognise this as having been cross-posted from tumblr to my compilation fic 'together' - I'm reposting my relapse-verse separately as a complete fic, along with the fourth and final part.
> 
> Warning for discussion of suicidal thoughts, depression/bipolar disorder and use of psychiatric medication.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> noun
> 
> a deterioration in someone's state of health after a temporary improvement. _"He responded well to treatment, but then suffered a relapse."_

Andrew is wading through the worst low he’s had in years. He’s heavy, weighed down like his bones are cored with platinum and not marrow, doing up his belt a notch tighter than he should be because food is all ash in his mouth.

Bee uses the word _relapse_  with him, explains that he’s veering off baseline like he can’t figure that out for himself. All Andrew cares about is that he hasn’t been looking for reasons to stay alive like this for so, so long.

This is him out of control. This is him trapped between apathy and the kind of hurt he can only do to himself, locked inside his own head. This is him, feeling nothing. Or, this is him, feeling pain. It gets hard to distinguish between the two.

Neil, caught up in his final year at PSU, is both distant and claustrophobically cloying by turns. There are miles and miles between them, Andrew in a different city and away from everything familiar. Neil doesn’t have to say that he’s lonely for Andrew to know that, just like Andrew doesn’t have to say he’s on the fucking floor right now. 

Neil has Robin, has Wymack, has an entire team of Foxes, and the latter might not be what he would call family, but they’re still there. He’s okay. 

Andrew has Neil a phone call away, Nicky texting him at half-hourly intervals, Bee’s continued presence in his life, a new apartment and a new team. He should be okay.

None of those things matter. That he should be okay - that doesn’t matter. He isn’t. There’s nothing he can do about that except wait it out.

The claustrophobic part is that Neil texts almost as much as Nicky these days - observations, complaints, the occasionally brutally sarcastic comment. He flies out whenever he can, even if he’s weaving on his feet with exhaustion and putting his already-dubious grades at risk just for a night and a day in Andrew’s presence. And Andrew doesn’t exactly make those trips rewarding for him.

His well-meant touch is too much like feeling, too much like pain - too much, just too much.

Andrew pushes him back, away, all their hard-fought-for proximity sacrificed for the time-bomb that is his brain. And Neil goes, like he always does.

That’s the trigger. Andrew just doesn’t see it until much, much later.

Not for Neil. That’s all Andrew, gun to his own head. He doesn’t know that until later, either. Doubt isn’t for people like him, committed to the core, but there’s a thread in him and he pulls on it at night when he can’t sleep and in the mornings when he struggles to get out of bed. 

_He stayed because of me_. That’s an irrefutable truth that Andrew holds inside him, twisted up tight with that doubt, and when he tugs on the latter both start to unravel. 

_There’s nothing left for him to stay for._

_Nothing_ feels like familiarity, a skin he slips into like he never tore it off. Or not a skin - something deeper, in the flickering, faltering heart of him, reaching from the inside out rather than the other way around. In his bones, in his veins, clawing at the back of his throat looking for an outlet that he can’t afford to give it, because he remembers that, too.

_There’s nothing left for him to stay for_  becomes _he won’t stay,_ with the same surety as Andrew devotes to every other truth. His brain is a liar sometimes, and he knows that, but it doesn’t mean anything in the face of being awake in the middle of the night with only it for company.

It’s easy to sink into silence, to let messages go unanswered until they slow to a trickle over days and then weeks, to ignore calls until they divert to the voicemail service he never calls back. Easier than opening his mouth, the idea of which makes his fingers feel numb and his tongue roll back down his throat.

He keeps going. There aren’t any other options he’s interested in, and besides every deal he’s ever made there’s still practice, still the contract he signed promising his new team his effort, still the wild, stupid adrenaline of just him and his car in the middle of the night going nowhere at all. Things that have nothing to do with the unreliability and untrustworthiness of human beings other than himself. Good reasons, or good enough, though they aren’t what he’s become used to.

That, he thinks, was his first mistake. Getting used to anything. Leaning on anyone, no matter how lightly. _He won’t stay._

His second is leaving the door cracked open. That’s always been a bad habit of his, even he’s there ready to slam it like a trap.

He gets a text on Friday night when he’s just getting back from a game: _thirty minutes from yours_. It’s Neil, unsurprisingly. Unlike him, to come here without explicit permission, considering how they left things last time. Then again, maybe it isn’t.

He lets himself in with the key Andrew gave him, dropping his bag just inside the door. He seems unsure, but not enough that he breaks his usual habits - keys on the bench, jacket over top with his phone and wallet weighing down the pockets, shoes kicked off where he knows they’re liable to cause someone to break their neck. It’s only his face when he turns to Andrew that gives away any uncertainty.

“Hey,” he says, a tiny pinch between his brows. 

Andrew doesn’t answer.

Neil takes a few steps closer, into the lounge where Andrew stands in the clear space between the couch and the wall. He’d been sitting there not quite waiting, lost, until he heard the key in the lock. He permits Neil close, and then closer, though Neil stops before he dares to touch. His eyes on Andrew are a physical weight.

“I missed you,” he says, easy. “You haven’t been answering your phone. I thought that was my bad habit, not yours.”

“So you thought you’d fly out to tell me that,” Andrew says. 

“No. I was worried about you,” Neil replies, like that should be obvious. Like it rolls off his tongue easily, that admission of how he feels and what he thinks. 

“So you thought you’d come and try your hand at fixing me instead,” Andrew says, voice sharp enough to cut. The tone feels strange on his tongue - like he should be hurt, too, wielding a weapon by the blade. He thinks he might be.

Neil looks back at him, disarmed like he always is and yet still not bleeding. “I don’t think I can.”

If Andrew were to look down, he suspects that he might be the one with the knife in his gut. He turns his face away. For some reason, that answer is less satisfying than he thought it might be, for all it’s the right one. The only one.

“I don’t need to,” Neil continued. “You can do that for yourself. You have before. But you know that I’m here to help, right?”

“Are you?”

“Here, or helpful?” Neil asks, half a joke that trips flat over Andrew’s silence. “I think the first is maybe more likely than the second, but I’m willing to try.”

He’s saying the right words. His hands, held low at his sides, keep his promises. Andrew thinks about the feel of them - _too much, too much_ \- and, suddenly, wants. He thinks that this moment is more painful than the five minutes preceding a key turning in the lock. 

“Don’t pretend like there’s anything here for you,” Andrew says. _There’s nothing_.

He meets Neil’s gaze head-on, which should be a threat. Neil clearly doesn’t think it so: he’s looking straight back, eyes narrowed like Andrew is a puzzle to figure out, a complex set of plays that Neil wants to master.

After a moment, he says, “Isn’t there?”

They’ve had this conversation before, in reverse. Neil, once called nothing, has called Andrew home before. Andrew is in the midst of burning that house to the ground with hands he has no control over, but that question makes him pause, blink, breathe in and then exhale smoke.

He says, “You tell me.” It doesn’t come out like a question, but he can tell by the shift in the set of Neil’s mouth - soft, then softer - that he recognises it as one.

“I’m looking right at it,” Neil says. “That’s why I’m here. Remember?”

He is here, eyes bruised dark like he hasn’t been sleeping right but still patient. Still solid, which has never been a word that Andrew associated with Neil Josten until right now, with his own foundations shaking.

“Andrew, I’m right here,” he says, low and something like gentle. “I’m right here.”

His gaze when Andrew meets it isn’t guileless - it’s direct. Intent. A promise. Andrew is the one who gave him a key. He’d forgotten that it happened that way around, for a second there.

Neil reaches out towards him, and then waits with his fingers in empty space. _I’m right here._

Andrew doesn’t believe him now, but he hasn’t forgotten what it was like to.He’s the one to close the gap. 

At least a little hurt is something.


	2. quietude

Neil flies back to PSU because he has to, but he desperately doesn’t want to. 

It’s not a familiar feeling. Even with the changes this year, with Andrew and the others graduated, Neil hasn’t ever thought of Palmetto as anything but home. As recently as months ago, he couldn’t consider the future without a tremor of trepidation at the thought of leaving it behind. 

Now, with Andrew retreating into a silence where Neil can’t follow him, it feels like his home - the one that isn’t any kind of house - is crumbling. 

He keeps hearing Andrew saying  _don’t pretend like there’s anything here for you_ in a voice like stone. That they’d kissed goodbye isn’t enough to erase the crystal clarity of those words from Neil’s mind, the certainty in Andrew’s every syllable. He knew before he went up there that things were getting bad, but it wasn’t until then that he’d realised exactly how bad.

The kind of quiet inside Andrew is a killer, and Neil knows it.

He’d said _I’m right here_. Now, miles and miles away, that feels like a promise that Neil is breaking. He doesn’t think he can afford to do that, and he knows that he doesn’t want to.

He’s expecting Robin to meet him at Upstate Regional, so he’s surprised when a familiar but unexpected voice calls his name. Dan Wilds’ yell is distinctive less because she’s conditioned herself to pitch her voice to be heard over a crowd - though that means plenty of _other_ people are looking at her - and more because Neil has been shouted out just like that more than he can even remember.

“Hey!” she says when he gets close enough, pulling him and his duffle bag into a brisk hug. “Good flight?”

“What’re you doing here?” Neil asks into her shoulder, in a tone more flat than he intends it to sound. Dan breaks the hug but holds him at arm’s distance for a moment, and even though she’s smiling it feels like she’s looking straight into his head.

“Visiting Coach. It’s been quiet around home,” she says, which is less a lie than it is a fundamental misunderstanding of what ‘quiet’ is really like. Dan’s schedule is nuts. “I commandeered your car so I could get around, and I’m under strict instructions to bring you over to Abby’s for dinner.”

Neil wants to climb into his bed and never get out. Abby and Wymack both know why he left, as does Dan, and he’s not sure he can bear spending an evening with the quiet weight of their knowledge any more than he could if they were the type to ask questions. He says, “She really doesn’t need to do that-”

“Don’t think it’s out of the kindness of her heart. We’re the ones who are cooking,” Dan replies. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”

She hooks her fingers into the strap of his bag and steals it, pushing his keys in his empty hand instead. He balances the weight of them in his palm for a moment before following her as she strides towards the doors.

Driving doesn’t relax him the way it does Andrew, but it’s something else to think about. Dan assists with the distraction by filling him in on the latest from her own team back home. Then she moves on to the Foxes: even though they have players now that she never worked with, she knows just about everything about them.

She’s a great coach. As much as it feels like sacrilege to imagine it, Neil can see her in Wymack’s place in the distant future. He can’t think of anyone better for the job.

When they arrive at Abby’s, Dan has to unlock the door to let them in. Neil realises when he throws a glance at his watch that Abby’s almost certainly at practice with the others, and feels a bolt of guilt over it. He should have asked Dan to take him straight to the court. He hadn’t even thought about it.

He thinks about the familiarity of drills, of his own voice loud in his ears, of control and the court in general, and abruptly realises he doesn’t want to be there anyway. The thought makes him blow out a silent sigh and scrub a hand over his face.

Dan goes directly to the fridge, dropping his duffel onto the little kitchen table. She pulls out a couple of grocery bags and puts them on the bench, throwing him a glance over her shoulder. “Come here and make yourself useful slicing all this.”

She perches on the edge of the table as he takes out a chopping board and pulls a knife from the block. He asks, “Are you just going to watch?”

She pulls an amused face at him. “I’ll cook. But I’m not starting to heat the pan until you’ve done at least half of that. You’re slow as hell, Josten.”

“Am not,” he replies, a rote response from years of this same argument, even though she’s right. The first time she ever accused him of having no ‘knife skills’ he’d laughed for obvious reasons, but he can’t fine-dice to save his life either.

He cores a red capsicum and starts to slice it into slivers. Dan’s quiet for a moment as he falls into the rhythm of the work.

“How’d it go?” she asks eventually. 

Neil doesn’t know how to answer that question. He’s instantly thinking of Andrew’s head in his lap as he slept, the curve of his arm loose at Neil’s waist. How he makes Neil feel like he’s doing the right thing but still half an inch from making a mistake he can’t recover from, and never more like that than over the last few weeks.

“It was okay,” he says. It’s not a question of whether Andrew is doing the right things - he is. He _always_ is. He’s doing his job and not drinking and talking to his doctors. Neil could live without the knowledge of him in his car breaking the law at night, but he trusts Andrew. That means trusting him not to make stupid mistakes as well as bad decisions.

He’s doing the right things. But Neil knows what it feels like to do the right thing and still have it not be enough. They’ve both lived that. Neil hoped they wouldn’t have to again, but they’re Foxes. It’s always been too much to ask for.

“So he’s doing alright?” Dan asks.

Done with the capsicum, Neil puts it to the side and pulls out a head of broccoli from the bag. He stares at it for a moment trying to decide the best way to break it down. “Yeah.”

It’s not a lie. And when Andrew accused him of travelling there to try and fix him, Neil said _I don’t think I can_. That wasn’t a lie either. It doesn’t feel anything like enough. 

“I feel like I need to do more,” Neil admits into the quiet. “I know I can’t. But I want to.”

He has to put the knife down. He’s liable to lose a finger otherwise.

“Neil,” Dan says, her voice more gentle than he thinks he’s ever heard it. “Hey.”

“It’s fine,” he replies. It comes out rough. “I’m just-”

 _Tired._  Even without saying the word, he feels instantly and openly pathetic. It sets his throat to burning. He can’t look at Dan, can’t look away from the tiles to the point they blur. 

This isn’t about him. Self-pity tastes disgustingly bitter as he swallows. But he’s exhausted, and he can’t control the way his hands shake even when he curls them into fists.

A warm palm drops onto his back, pressing between his shoulder blades. Dan’s tone is conversational when she says, “Yeah. It’s a real bastard.”

Neil huffs a laugh. It cracks through the middle. “What’s a bastard?”

Dan hums in thought. “Life? In general?”

“Yeah,” Neil has to agree. He unclenches his fingers, scrubbing momentarily at his face. When he reaches for the knife again, Dan beats him to it, gently hip-checking him out of her way. He ends up standing next to her watching her, feeling less awkward than maybe he should to hover. She’s right - she’s much faster than he is.

“After Matt’s run-in with the monsters, it took me a long time to realise I wasn’t just furious,” Dan says as she finishes the broccoli and starts on a pair of onions. “I mean, I was angry. Still am a little. But I was also frustrated that I couldn’t do more to help him. That I couldn’t just…I don’t know, lend him my will or stubbornness or sobriety. It doesn’t matter how accustomed you get to helplessness. It’s still awful.”

“I’m sure you did everything you could,” Neil says. He can’t imagine Dan doing anything less than that.

“Yes, I did. But I couldn’t fight his battles. He had to win them for himself. At the end of the day, all I could do was be there and give him something to fight for,” she says. “I just loved him really, really hard. And I think you’ve got that part down already.”

Neil doesn’t say anything to that. He fiddles absently with the corner of the grocery bag.

“I guess I got lucky because he won in the end,” Dan goes on softly. “Not everyone does. But you and I both know Andrew is one hell of a fighter.”

 _One hell of a fighter_. That’s certainly the truth.

Neil nods, and then says in a more level tone, “Do you want me to heat the pan?”

“Yeah, go for it,” she says. “But first…”

He looks up and meets her gaze head on. Her mobile face is set into serious lines, her eyes warm and concerned. She says, “Wasn’t that so much faster when I did it?”

He bumps her back with his hip on purpose when he reaches for the drawer where the frying pans are kept. “Yeah, yeah.”


	3. incurable

That Andrew trusts Betsy isn’t a secret, but the why of it isn’t necessarily obvious. 

He knows that Neil wonders. That’s because Neil, of course, trusts Betsy as far as he could throw her and not an inch further. The luxury of living a life not defined by his ability to cut and run at any moment hasn’t expanded his ability to separate trust in, like of and use for, in terms of other people.

It’s almost like he has some kind of trauma. He should probably see a therapist about that.

At the end of their first session, Betsy had asked if Andrew had any questions. He’d said, smiling sharp and unceasingly, “Are you like the others?”

Betsy had frowned. “In what way?”

“Wanting to fix me,” Andrew said. He meant _trying to_   _prove they can_. Psychiatrists were to him intellectuals who didn’t understand the dark and dirt-stained heart of him, who thought they could drug the killing instinct out of him. They weren’t right - that his hands weren’t dripping red was out of self-control and a limited need for it, not the medication that he swallowed as penance.

Sometimes people just need to be dead. Apparently you need to grow up like Andrew did to understand that, though.

He’d asked that same question before. He’d never gotten a satisfactory answer. Bee’s fifteen-minute-long explanation of curing versus treating mental illness was less a cop-out and more a genuine misunderstanding of what Andrew was asking.

It was, unfortunately, also fifteen minutes of theory he needed to hear. It’s the reason he went back to the second appointment and, more to the point, the reason why lucky number thirteen outlasted the others by years.

Treating isn’t the same as fixing. Andrew is, in every sense, incurable - a scourge - but that tricky word _treatable_ has been in his vocabulary ever since. Not always favourably. But there.

 _Incurable_ would kill him, if he let it. 

By the time they hit winter break, he’s crawling. Technically, he’s been crawling for a while - his hands and knees are metaphorically bloody. As for what he’s doing for the holidays, there’s no question there. He got an airline ticket emailed to him a few weeks ago from n.a.josten with no subject line. The message read _come home_.

Flying is painful at the best of times. By the time Andrew picks up his bag at the other end, his jaw has been clenched so long he can’t see straight through the headache, his hands prickling with pins and needles. It’s all he can feel - his body rebelling, matching his brain. 

Neil’s waiting for him, hands in the pockets of his coat as he scans the crowd. His gaze finds Andrew a moment after Andrew sees him. He’s a mirage, probably - Andrew can’t quite dismiss the idea.

 _Come home_. 

Andrew tells his body _do as I say,_ and goes to him.

“Hey,” Neil says, hooking fingers through the strap of his bag and transferring it to his shoulder. He doesn’t wait for an answering greeting, turning on his heel and leading the way out.

The ride to the Columbia house is silent, the radio off. Neil drives casually, one hand curled around the steering wheel and the other loose on his thigh. Andrew turns his face away, watching a haze of landmarks whip past through the window.

It’s not a long drive, but he startles awake when the engine turns off. The bump of his elbow against the car door and the rush of cold air as Neil gets out brings him back. Neil’s looking at him, eyes level and still. He says, “We’re here.”

“Obviously,” Andrew replies, voice rough. His fingers feel rubbery but more like his when he undoes his seatbelt. 

The house looks the same as he remembers - Nicky’s planning on selling it next year, but for now it’s Neil’s bolthole and Andrew’s the one paying the mortgage off. Neil, with Andrew’s bag bobbing on his back, leaves the door hanging open for Andrew but doesn’t wait for him.

Andrew smokes his way through a cigarette, then goes up to the bathroom and showers. Under the hot water, his heavy tiredness transitions to jittery gone-too-far exhaustion. The temptation to get into bed rather than dress and go back downstairs is crushing: he wants to crawl into the narrow gap between his bag and Neil’s and just give himself over to sleep.

It’s a familiar feeling at this point. Probably false, considering the creep of restlessness in him now - it’s more likely he’d lie there awake and unable to get out of his head, which is just as familiar. Thankfully he’s long used to doing the things he doesn’t want to.

Downstairs, Neil is sitting on the couch watching something on TV. His quiet is carefully practiced, and irritating. Andrew’s gotten familiar with Neil’s particular kind of pleasure at their reunions, and this toned-down performance is so obviously for Andrew’s benefit that it grates. That’s at least half the reason why he buries his feet under Neil’s thighs when he lies down on the other end of the couch.

Getting his head down in the mostly-dim room instantly dulls the throbbing inside his skull. Silently - though probably not unnoticeably - he exhales, slow.

He feels the gentlest brush of fingers at the hem of his pants, and says, “Yes.” Neil’s warm palm curls around his ankle, in the safe space between too soft and too hard, holding firm. 

It’s fine. It’s not nothing, and it’s not pain. He lets himself feel it and breathes through in the way that he’s been taught.

 _Come home._ Close enough, he figures - despite himself right now he can imagine getting up tomorrow morning, the particular shifts and shades of Neil’s expressions when he’s half awake but already moving. And right now, sore and tired and something else, he feels more like treatable than terminal.

Neil’s thumb runs once over the jut of his ankle. “Good to see you, by the way.”

Close enough. 

 


	4. recovery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> noun
> 
> 1) a return to normal state of health, mind or strength. _“He made a full recovery from cancer.”_
> 
> 2) the action or process of regaining possession or control of something stolen or lost. _“A specialised team were sent to ensure the recovery of the body.”_

It becomes hard for Andrew to justify putting himself back together at all when he keeps hitting the wall hard enough to break again.

He’d said years ago now to Jean Moreau _you can’t cut down someone who’s already in the gutter_. Andrew was born there and it took a long, long time for him to crawl his way out, tasting someone else’s blood mixed with his own, like a rebirth. 

Maybe he shouldn’t have bothered. He’s not sure if it’s worth the effort to try it again. Plenty of people have told him he belongs in the gutter, in the grave. Perhaps they’re right.

He would give himself over to it entirely, except he’s spent too much time with people intent on throwing themselves towards the stars these last few years. Renee, Kevin, Neil, his brother - continually reaching upwards, and dragging Andrew up alongside them.

Farther to fall, for all of them. But it’s only Andrew falling, and that’s such a pretty, pretty metaphor for a gore-ugly feeling. Like broken limbs, like bruises, like pain and fear he could never bleed out with the rest. Something people kept teaching him, not taking from him like they did everything else.

Well. Not quite everyone. 

He flips his phone open and shut. He isn’t sure how many times he’s done that, isn’t even entirely sure what time it is, but the motion feels smooth as muscle memory in his hand. He opens it, dials, presses the skin-warm plastic to his face.

The ringing is bright and painful to his ears, but it doesn’t ring long before the line clicks live.

“Hey,” Neil says. Andrew’s senses aren’t discerning - his calm and familiar voice is irritating, too. 

Once upon a time, Neil rang him just like this from outside the Foxhole Court, using Andrew like an immovable object against his ultimately-stoppable force. And he had been a force of nature, drawn to shattering point under the weight of things Andrew understood even without the real specifics. He’d bound Neil in place, with a promise and himself. That’s why they are to each other, by turns.

Andrew’s hands haven’t stopped shaking in days. He can’t remember the last time he slept. Last night he poured himself too much whiskey and thought about dying again, and it’s a force inside himself he doesn’t think he can stop alone. 

He says, “Come and get me.”

 

* * *

 

Neil flies out, but they drive back to South Carolina. Neil drives, anyway - Andrew wouldn’t drive off the road on purpose with him familiar in the passenger seat, but he might do it by accident.

Without the distraction of driving, Andrew can’t sit still, jittery and grinding his teeth and irritable over the waves of bone deep exhaustion. Dull like this on the inside, every external stimulus is an assault on him. It’s a long drive - Neil can’t do anything for him except keep going, with brief pauses for him to rest while Andrew paces and fumes and occasionally breaks things.

He knows what this is. It’s still a relief to sit in Betsy’s office and hear her say the phrase _mixed affective state_ and finally have it all slot into place in his jumbled mind for a second, switch the labels from _this will be the thing that kills me_ to _treatable_.

Neil shifts at Andrew’s side. Right now Andrew can’t bear the thought of Neil touching him - even his own clothes against his skin feel too harsh - but he can’t let him out of his sight either. It’s not the first time Neil’s sat through a session with him anyway.

“The way I see it, we have two options,” Betsy says, her stare level, measuring. “The first is that you keep going on the way you have been.”

She doesn’t say _until you can’t anymore_ , but it’s implied so clearly that she might as well. It’s not like he doesn’t see her point - that’s why he’s here again, more than six months after he first told her he was spiralling. 

“The second is that you try medication,” she continues. She doesn’t need to go on. They’ve had this conversation before, more than once. Every time before this he’s said no, because he can’t forget the constant fight for control against court-mandated hypomania, can’t stop remembering what that grin felt like.

Except that months and years later, still struggling, still tasting gutter water and afraid to look at the sky, he has started to think;  _I won’t wait forever_. And _I can do better than this -_ which sometimes sounds too much like _I can’t do this._

Neil, who has always dedicated too much of his life trying to defend Andrew, says, “Is that really necessary?” He remembers, too. 

“Whether it’s necessary isn’t really the question,” Betsy replies. “It’s more of a suggestion, and a question of consent. Anyone capable of asking for help is capable of consenting their treatment. That just means it’s a yes or no to the option of it.”

“So what if he doesn’t? Take anything, I mean. If he says no,” Neil says. He must be able to guess, but then again, maybe he can’t - he hasn’t been here before, for the grittiest dirt of it all. Perhaps he just wants to hear it out loud.

“I can’t say for sure. No one can,” Betsy says. “Andrew’s disorder is by nature unpredictable. He could spontaneously improve. He could decline further, which is common in untreated patients. There’s a high rate of compulsory hospitalisation of people with unmanaged bipolar disorder too. As well as the major depressive and mixed episodes he’s already shown, there’s a risk of full-blown mania and psychosis.”

“He’s not psychotic,” Neil says, through force of habit in the face of that old accusation.

“Not yet,” Andrew says. It hurts to talk - he’s bitten the inside of his mouth bloody at some point, though he doesn’t remember when. Eidetic memory is great up until you start losing your grip on reality. His voice comes out rough but unmistakably dry.

“We can wait, of course. But Andrew has already waited a long time," Betsy says, though gently for Neil’s sake. “I wouldn’t suggest it unless I thought it was a worthwhile plan of action. Finding the correct medications can take some trial and error, but it also saves people’s lives.”

Neil looks like he’s about to keep going, scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas like he thinks Andrew needs to be protected from Betsy and all her nasty ways of trying to help him. It’s less irritating than it should be to have him speak around Andrew, and Andrew knows exactly why that is.

When he was sentenced after everything with Nicky, everyone - his lawyer, his court-appointed psychiatrist, Nicky himself - said the medication was his way out, his freedom, his saviour. Even when it became obvious that it was twisting him, that he was a hair’s breath from losing the control they didn’t think him capable of anyway, no one said anything. Andrew wasn’t considered able to speak for himself, but he had no one to speak for him either. At least, no one who said the words that were cramming in his throat, caught up in the teeth he showed in his smile.

Prison wasn’t a great alternative to the drugs, and he couldn’t keep his promises from there, but from the edge of having his sanity stripped from him entirely it looked pretty fucking great by comparison.

Neil Josten might not people’s idea of an advocate, but they probably haven’t met every big-mouthed and protective inch of him. Those people also likely haven’t seen the way he quiets at Andrew’s look, mouth closing as he looks back with his concern written large across his face for Andrew to read.

Andrew hates that expression. He hates that he believed Neil saying _I’m here to help_ months ago, and hates that he was right. _I’m right here_ \- that was what he said, and the second Andrew had asked for Neil to come for him, he’d done it, everything else be damned.

“I’ll do it,” Andrew says. When he looks back to Betsy, there’s no surprise on her face - just mild approval in the softness about her eyes. 

“If you’re sure,” she says, offering him an escape exit like she always does. He’s never bothered to answer her before, and he doesn’t now - he wouldn’t have said yes if he had uncertainties.

He leaves Betsy’s office with a prescription that he passes to Neil, unable to stand the crinkle of paper against his palms. Their fingers don’t brush. The light looks strange outside, mostly because he doesn’t know what time it is. It burnishes the reddish parts of Neil’s hair to fire and gold, makes Andrew blink. _I’m right here._

“Columbia?” Neil asks. His eyes catch the sun when he looks at Andrew over the roof of the car, turning them nearly translucent. “We can go to a drugstore on the way.”

Andrew gets into the passenger seat. Maybe he’s not immune to looking at stars after all.

 

* * *

 

**Andrew Minyard Receives Martin-Carr Award for Goalkeeper of the Year**

_Gillian Stokes_

In just his second year in the professional leagues, controversial goalkeeper Minyard, 25, has won the top prize at last night’s National Association of Exy Awards Ceremony. Minyard also confronted allegations that the reason for the early end of his first season was due to a stint in rehab by openly mentioning his battle with mental illness is his acceptance speech... **read more**

 

**Andrew Minyard’s College Thesis is Making the Rounds Online: Why You Should Read It**

_Alex Aoki_

It’s entitled ‘Mental Illness in Juveniles in the Justice System’, and it’s a confronting read. While you couldn’t call Minyard ‘outspoken’, he has become something of a figurehead for mentally ill athletes in Exy since admitting to suffering from Bipolar Disorder at... **read more**

 

**Playing in the Dark: Professional Athletes Talk Mental Illness and Suicide**

_Laurel Davies_ speaks to athletes at the top of their respective sports about mental illness, medication, the risk of suicide, and the silence that many of them are forced to endure in the course of pursuing their careers. Angus Fletcher (Football), Deeva Patel (Tennis), Andrew Minyard (Exy) and Madeleine Chen (Swimming) are all... **read more**


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